


Checklist

by CalicoCats



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Introspection, Minor Character Death, and worms for one part, there are more characters but they don’t appear as much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23077024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CalicoCats/pseuds/CalicoCats
Summary: Jon recalls details about his encounters with the entities and their avatars.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 31





	Checklist

**Author's Note:**

> there’s canon typical violence in this and canon character deaths but they’re not described in depth and are mostly implied. This contains spoilers for seasons 1-4 up until 160, spider and worm mentions, brief trypophobia, grieving, and hospital/surgery/injury mentions. not uncommon for tma, but i feel like i should warn for it

1.

A Guest For Mr. Spider has Jon leaving his bedroom door open for months. He doesn’t want to close it just to realize when he reopens it that it doesn’t lead to the hallway anymore. He can’t leave every door open, but Mr. Spider can’t be hiding behind every door at once. Right? Right.

He doesn’t knock on doors much anymore, and he knows people think it’s rude, but it’s for their safety and his. He can’t be certain he’s still not caught in a web, and he doesn’t want to drag anyone else with him in case the book still has a hold on him.

The book was only a segment of the Web, made for convenience if anything. Another strand that tied back to something greater. Looking back, Jon can see the naïveté in believing the Mother needed any conduit to pull the strings.

2.

Before working in the Magnus Institute, Jon had never got when people said they could feel someone staring at them. Sure, he’d caught people staring at him sometimes, but that was more coincidence and luck than any gut feeling.

He gets it a little more when he starts working in Research. The occasional weight of someone looking at him, heavy enough to cause him to turn and ask what they need. Nothing to write home about.

A week into working in the Archives and he can’t stop noticing eyes on him. He thinks it’s one of his assistants at first, but it continues when he’s alone. In his office, in the break room, in the storage room, anywhere in the archives, really. It’s subtle, but constant.

He wants to ask, but admitting it to anyone may make it real. As it is now, he can brush it away as another side effect of the job rather than a condition of it.

3.

Prentiss’s ashes and the worms that litter the tunnels are the only remaining signs that the institute had almost been taken over by worms, save the circular scars Jon and Tim share. Jon had almost moved her ashes to an empty drawer out of fear of the unlikely event of her and her worms springing out of the jar and rising from the ashes like an awful, worm infested phoenix, but if Martin got suspicious when he saw the ashes missing... well. Best not to risk that.

The fear that his coworkers would backstab him had been greater than his fear of Prentiss at that point.

But that was back when the Archive was made mostly up of its original team. The jar of ashes still sits on Jon’s desk, the worms in the tunnels have mostly decomposed, and Jon is now the only one to carry the Corruption’s scars from the attack on the institute.

He had thought, when he was new to the Archives and still knee deep in denying the supernatural, that Prentiss’s acceptance of the worms had made her a monster. He couldn’t imagine making the same decision, to become a hive. 

Now he thinks about Jane’s statement, about how she was scared and she was changing and she was loved. Jon thinks about how he is terrified and changed and alone, surrounded by people he feels tolerate him at best. He understands it now, that need to be loved.

4.

The only consistent thing about Michael is that he wears warm clothes. Even as he twists and turns and spirals, his outfit, incomprehensible as it is, is always fit for a snow storm. No matter the weather or the sweltering heat, Michael wears layers upon layers of ever shifting jackets and sweaters. 

It is only when Jon learns of what happened to Michael Shelley does this click as a trace of the person Michael once was. Someone who wanted to grasp onto the last bit of warmth and certainty he had before derailing an entity’s existence by unwillingly cutting short his own.

5.

The web table is still in Artifact Storage, splintering and gathering dust. It’s beyond repair, but no one is ever especially eager to clear out the contents of artifact storage. There are no spiderwebs covering its insides anymore, and it’s mesmerizing patterns no longer hold the same pull. 

Jon checks on it occasionally. At first it had been half out of curiosity, half in case the Not-Them was still connected to it. But the strings of silk have been cut, and the table is now just a table. 

The web table is Sasha’s grave marker, in a way. She’d never gotten a proper funeral, and Jon suspects the Not-Sasha would remain a missing person until they were both forgotten. 

Somewhere between researching the Unknowing and stopping it, Jon visits artifact storage and mourns someone he isn’t sure he knew. 

6.

When Jon goes to shake Jude’s hand, he is surprised to find the wax cool to the touch. There’s a second where he thinks the gamble of shaking her hand may have gone in his favor, that instead of harming his hand in exchange for his invasive questioning she’s letting him off with a warning.

She gives him a shaky smile, and if Jon wasn’t so on edge he may have tentatively smiled back. Her smile’s not shaky because of nerves, but more of the lack of them. Her smile is shaky because it is melting into a sneer. Her hand melts with it. 

7.

When Jon falls Michael —  Mike Crew falls with him. Where Jon can’t think to breathe and ask anything, Mike goes about making himself a cup of tea as if nothing out of the ordinary is going on. He makes one for Jon, too, to be polite. For someone who throws people off high places for a living then forgets about it sometimes, this probably isn’t even a particularly interesting Friday. 

Jon tries to reach for the cup, hoping it might soothe his throat after screaming about falling to an uncertain end, but while the cup looks close it appears to move farther whenever Jon reaches for it. Of course.

The part of Mike Crew’s story that sticks with Jon is his disregard for the danger that Leitners pose. The way he disposed of them when he had no more use for them... had A Guest For Mr. Spider been discarded the same way? Left to harm whoever was unlucky enough to pick it up once it’s previous owner had no use for it, looked for in the first place so that it could be used to escape another power.

Jon worries about it while futilely trying to grab the cup of tea, which somehow doesn’t spill anything while falling with him.

8.

Daisy knows how to find people. There’s times where she wants to see Basira then finds herself at the doorway to the break room while Basira heats up some leftover takeout, Daisy’s legs having moved on their own.

She’s not hunting in these moments, it’s more of an intuition. It’s easier with people who’ve interacted with the entities in some way or another, of course. She’s a monster hunter at heart. But the things that help her hunt can be used to find other things. 

Almost a year after the unknowing, Daisy explains this to Jon while they sit in his office, ignoring paperwork and listening to the Archers. While the Hunt’s influence has been mostly choked out of her by the Buried, this small intuition remains. She can find her coworkers wherever they are in the Archives. She doesn’t usually need to do this to locate Jon, given he usually sticks to his office. 

He wants to say something about how he probably isn’t human enough to account for just intuition in finding him, but Daisy’s expecting him to say something like this. Instead, he hums to show he’s paying attention and makes sure there’s no tape recorders around.

9.

Jon takes a literal approach to sleeping when your dead. His time is filled with dreams, dog-earing his memories of the statements as he recalls them with uncanny clarity. He is watching and he is watched until his subconscious decides to pull him out of limbo. 

Dreaming through purgatory for six months and suddenly waking up feels like waking up from a nap disheveled, sweaty, and no more well rested than before. Jon supposes it would be worse if he didn’t eat people’s recollections of unfortunate events. Have to keep a balanced diet.

He goes back to recording statements, and considers saying that they were recorded by the Archivist, postmortem. Hedoesn’t want to worry anyone, so he sticks with just the Archivist. It’s a worrying enough title as is.

10.

Melanie’s anger under the Slaughter’s influence varies from others in that it is directed for the most part. Elias is not a random target but someone who has shown her her father’s death. The avatars of the Flesh infiltrated the Institute first, and she’d done her part in clearing them out. The Institute itself has her trapped, and her anger over the that spills over to the people in the same situation. The bullet is not the source of Melanie’s anger, but amplifies and refines it. 

The bullet is removed as well as an amateur surgeon with partial omniscience can remove a bullet. The wound will scar with time, a reminder of the Slaughter’s music. When Melanie wakes up she stabs Jon with one of the scalpels, giving him his own wound on the shoulder. It scars before he leaves the tunnels.

An eye for an eye, a scar for a scar. Something like that.

11.

Besides the need to know, Jon had thought that trading a statement for another rib might have acted like a crude anesthetic. It would still hurt, more than removing just one rib, but the statement would dull it. Like drinking whiskey as a pain killer, maybe.

Jon takes the live statement, and it feels like he’s eaten a hearty meal. Seconds before Jared goes to pull out two ribs, Beholding reminds Jon that people usually have surgeries on an empty stomach.

After the pain from hallway rib removal subsides enough for Jon to pay attention to his surroundings again, he takes a close look at his new anchor. He’s so relieved to find his rib eye free he laughs. It seems he isn’t entirely all eyes.

12.

Jon walks into the coffin knowing it might be his final resting place. Not that he’d rest much down there.

With how far the staircase and tunnels go he almost expects to see a door that shouldn’t be there. But where the Distortion plays with perception, the Buried gives no illusion to what it is: a grave that doesn’t accept the dead.

It is cloying and claustrophobic and g-d, does Jon need a shower, but he finds Daisy, severed from the Hunt’s influence.

They retrace Jon’s steps back to surface and towards the pull of his anchor. As they stumble, Jon wonders if he stayed here long enough if the Buried would cut out his connection with the Eye entirely and replace it with soil. He isn’t sure he knows what he’d be like without his patron, now. 

13.

Jon does not know the science behind the dark star, and he suspects there is no science to explain it. It is kept up by the conviction that it should be possible. As long as no one looks too closely at how it was created and how it continues to exist, this is enough.

He looks directly at the dark star. The light bends around it so that there is a black hole in the room in the shape of a celestial body. The Eye scrutinizes it and picks it apart, unraveling the conviction that held together Manuela’s life work. 

Jon Knows it is beautiful and knows it should not exist. So it doesn’t.

14.

When Peter Lukas dies it almost seems like he escaped further into the lonely, with his body enveloped in mist as it is. He is not pulling the fog around him but is becoming the very fog he shrouds himself with. In seconds he is gone, and his last gift to his patron is joining the roiling mist made up of the unlucky, lonely people who died forsaken. He has gone back to the sea, in a way. The Lonely’s isolated waters feel just as real as any other.

Jon watches this with cold disinterest, but Beholding catalogues it into a neat file. He is here to keep someone from the same fate. He will not let Martin voluntarily fade to mist.

* * *

Three years of working at the Archives, and Jon gets three weeks away with Martin. A much needed reprieve for the both of them, to not have to concern themselves with the entities and Elias. It’s cut far too short. Everything clicks into place, and though Jon closes his eyes and covers his mouth with a burned hand he reads the statement clear as ever.

Martin is there for him, then, an anchor through a lifetime’s worth of fear and misery even though Martin’s as terrified as Jon is. He holds Jon up, figuratively and literally. Jon’s legs don’t want to support him at the moment.

Jon looks at the eyes. He sees through the lens that has covered the sky and that blink with the sun. The world is under a magnifying glass, and it feels like he is both the one holding it and the one burning under its gaze. 

Through the sky Jon could scrutinize his own fears, and Beholding would take it as willingly as it would anyone else’s.

**Author's Note:**

> the numbers are in order of when Jon encounters the entities/avatars, and some of the writing is out of order timeline wise. Alternatively it’s a list rating the entities 
> 
> 1.web  
> 2.eye  
> 3.corruption  
> 4.spiral  
> 5.stranger  
> 6.desolation  
> 7.vast  
> 8.hunt  
> 9.end  
> 10.slaughter  
> 11.flesh  
> 12.buried  
> 13.dark  
> 14.lonely


End file.
